LaRose: A Novel

North Dakota, late summer, 1999. Landreaux Iron stalks a deer along the edge of the property bordering his own. He shoots with easy confidence - but when the buck springs away, Landreaux realizes he's hit something else, a blur he saw as he squeezed the trigger. When he staggers closer, he realizes he has killed his neighbor's five-year-old son, Dusty Ravich.

The Plague of Doves

The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.

The Birchbark House

With exquisite care, National Book Critics Circle Award winner Louise Erdrich has fashioned a story rich in the way of life and heritage of the Ojibwa people, a story that begs to be told out loud. As each season in a year of Omakayas' life is lovingly portrayed, the satisfying rhythm of her days is shattered when a stranger visits the lodge one night, bringing with him an invisible enemy that will change things forever.

Four Souls & Tracks: Two Novels

In the world of interconnected novels by Louise Erdrich, Four Souls is most closely linked to Tracks. All these works continue and elaborate on the intricate story of life on a reservation peopled by saints and false saints, heroes and sinners, clever fools and tenacious women. Louise Erdrich reminds us of the deep spirituality and the ordinary humanity of this world, and these works are as beautiful and lyrical as anything she has written.

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

For more than a half century, Father Damien Modeste has served his beloved people, the Ojibwe, on the remote reservation of Little No Horse. Now, nearing the end of his life, Father Damien dreads the discovery of his physical identity, for he is a woman who has lived as a man. To complicate his fears, his quiet life changes when a troubled colleague comes to the reservation to investigate the life of the perplexing, difficult, possibly false saint Sister Leopolda.

A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel

A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in an elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov. When, in 1922, he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel's doors.

You Don't Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir

When his mother passed away at the age of 78, Sherman Alexie responded the only way he knew how: He wrote. The result is this stunning memoir. Featuring 78 poems and 78 essays, Alexie shares raw, angry, funny, profane, tender memories of a childhood few can imagine - growing up dirt poor on an Indian reservation, one of four children raised by alcoholic parents. Throughout, a portrait emerges of his mother as a beautiful, mercurial, abusive, intelligent, complicated woman.

The Red-Haired Woman: A Novel

On the outskirts of a town 30 miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before - not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world.

The Underground Railroad (Oprah's Book Club)

The Newest Oprah Book Club 2016 Selection. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood - where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned - Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

March

As the North reels under a series of unexpected defeats during the dark first year of the war, one man leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. Riveting and elegant as it is meticulously researched, March is an extraordinary novel woven out of the lore of American history.

News of the World: A Novel

In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust.

Salvage the Bones: A Novel

Best-selling author Jesmyn Ward won the National Book Award for this poignant and poetic novel. Unfolding over 12 days, the story follows a poor family living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. With Hurricane Katrina bearing down on them, the Batistes struggle to maintain their community and familial bonds amid the storm and the stark poverty surrounding them.

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine: A Novel

Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she's thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office.

Anything Is Possible: A Novel

Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother's happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author's celebrated New York Times best seller) returns to visit her siblings after 17 years of absence.

Flight

Flight is the hilarious and tragic story of an orphaned Indian boy - "Zits" - who travels back and forth through time in a charged search for his true identity. With powerful, swift prose, Flight follows the troubled teenager as he learns that violence is not the answer.

The Sympathizer: A Novel

Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 2016. It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong.

The Handmaid's Tale: Special Edition

After a violent coup in the United States overthrows the Constitution and ushers in a new government regime, the Republic of Gilead imposes subservient roles on all women. Offred, now a Handmaid tasked with the singular role of procreation in the childless household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife, can remember a time when she lived with her husband and daughter and had a job, before she lost everything, even her own name.

The Master Butcher's Singing Club

What happens when a trained killer discovers, in the aftermath of war, that his true vocation is love? Having survived the killing fields of World War I, Fidelis Waldvogel returns home to his quiet German village and marries the pregnant widow of his best friend, killed in action.

Beartown

People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working men who founded this town. And in that ice rink is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today. Their junior ice hockey team is about to compete in the national semifinals, and they actually have a shot at winning.

The long-awaited first novel from the author of Tenth of December: a moving and original father-son story featuring none other than Abraham Lincoln, as well as an unforgettable cast of supporting characters, living and dead, historical and invented. February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over 40 years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

Homegoing: A Novel

Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in 18th-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and will live in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising children who will be sent abroad to be educated before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the empire. Esi, imprisoned beneath Effia in the castle's women's dungeon and then shipped off on a boat bound for America, will be sold into slavery.

Imagine Me Gone

When Margaret's fiancé, John, is hospitalized for depression in 1960s London, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans despite what she now knows of his condition, or back away from the suffering it may bring her. She decides to marry him. Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic who makes sense of the world through parody.

A Man Called Ove

Meet Ove. He's a curmudgeon - the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him "the bitter neighbor from hell". But behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness.

Publisher's Summary

National Book Award, Fiction, 2012

One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and 13-year-old son, Joe. In one day, Joe's life is irrevocably transformed. He tries to heal his mother, but she will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude. Increasingly alone, Joe finds himself thrust prematurely into an adult world for which he is ill prepared.

While his father, who is a tribal judge, endeavors to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to get some answers of his own. Their quest takes them first to the Round House, a sacred space and place of worship for the Ojibwe. And this is only the beginning.

Written with undeniable urgency, and illuminating the harsh realities of contemporary life in a community where Ojibwe and white live uneasily together, The Round House is a brilliant and entertaining novel, a masterpiece of literary fiction. Louise Erdrich embraces tragedy, the comic, a spirit world very much present in the lives of her all-too-human characters, and a tale of injustice that is, unfortunately, an authentic reflection of what happens in our own world today.

I purchased this novel because I saw the title on quite a few lists of the best books of 2012 and I wasn't disappointed in the least. It's a coming-of-age story at the centre of First Nation history, reservation life, Indian mythology, family, a horrendous crime and so much more. Wonderful, a 'do not miss' novel. I had some trouble with the narrator at first but became accustomed to his style. I could have listened to hours more.

This book has been heavy in my head. Had I written a knee-jerk review 3 days ago from that thick head, I would have misinformed you. I hadn't synthesized the weight of all that is between the words: the legend and mythology that give eloquence to the silly ramblings of an old sleeping man; the traditions that guided the daily activities of the Native American characters; the history of duplicity that corralled a people into reservations and snuffed out their cultural identity. Heavy in my head because this book is structured so beautifully that much of it speaks to us from the spaces between the words--a language we grasp in our core consciousness. Now translated...the story is heavy in my heart.

The *Heads I win, Tails you lose* treaties that made a story like this possible, (virtually creating a Free Rape Zone) are in the words of this story's narrator, "a gut kick," that compounds an already tragic event. The characters are vividly written and fondly familiar as a family member or good neighbor. Especially compelling is the young Joe. (The story is recalled by an older Joe.) The violent hate crime perpetrated against his mother skins him of his innocence and naivete, catapulting him prematurely into a foreign adult world. His group of friends, their teenage rites of passages and proclivities, tentatively anchor him to his youthful life, and reminded me of the group of friends in Stand By Me (The Body).

There are many themes in this intricate and tense novel, some rooted generations deep. (Reading Native American literature sometimes makes me feel like a person with the same surname as a horrendous criminal must feel each time the name is broadcast.) Erdrich writing is stunning - almost painfully beautiful as she combines the contrasting elements that make up this profound story. I would say more profound, because of her craftsmanship, than *depresssing*...one of the words in reviews that kept me from listening before...

I have considered this book since it was published and passed for different reasons. The asides, or the stories told by the elders of the tribes, may seem like irrelevant ramblings, humorous or raunchy stories. Look passed the old Mooshum's dream-talking, and the aunts and grandmothers intent on embarassing the young boys with their youthful recollections--these stories are crucial to the heart of this story--they are the history, the scripture, the culture ties, the logic, and cleverly placed by Erdrich to keep the suspense in the forefront while adding perspective. Addressing the narrator: Gary Farmer is a Native American that has many acting credits and obviously has experience with script. His reading hit me as authentic rather than disruptive and added a necessary discomfort to the rhythm of words--because they should be a little uncomfortable in this context, and the story should sit heavy in our hearts.

I read that this novel is the middle of a trilogy (the first volume being Plague of Doves). I love finding an author that is new to me and I can't wait to read everything Erdrich has written. Very deserving of the the National Book Award.

Where does The Round House rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Difficult to say -- This is a long string of vignettes, many of which are brilliant and made better by the excellent narrator. I listen during commuting and as such, didn't feel that the story was done justice by my split attention between driving and listening. This is a book better listened to with full attention. There are too many subtle gems to miss.

What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?

The interplay between native American assimilation and independence -- always in tension and a contrast that was always illuminating.

What does Gary Farmer bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Cadence, tone, and intonation. This was a story made to be read by Farmer.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

It made me feel. It was raw and beautiful.

Any additional comments?

As I mentioned, this is a book to listened to as narrated by Farmer. Wouldn't have been nearly as special to have read this book. Just don't listen while distracted. Do yourself a favor and listen with intention.

For me, this novel was about as close to perfect as contemporary fiction gets. It's beautifully written, well-voiced, full of memorable characters, and a rich snapshot of life on a North Dakota Indian reservation in the late 1980s. The narrator, Joe, is a grown man remembering a few life-shaping months of his early teens. The book begins with Joe and his father, a reservation judge, coming upon Joe's mother, who has just been assaulted and raped. The situation soon grows in complexity -- Geraldine takes to her bed and can't (or won't) recall who attacked her, and because the attack occurred somewhere close to the reservation boundary, it's unclear whose legal jurisdiction it falls into.

With his mother in legal and emotional limbo, and the police seemingly disinterested, the young Joe takes it on himself to solve the crime, though he proceeds in a typically fumbling, distractible adolescent manner. What follows is a story that's a lot of things at once. It's a mystery, a coming-of-age story, a drama of family and best friends, and a reflection on the history of a people struggling to maintain control of their own laws and culture within the larger framework of American society and its systems. Through Joe's young eyes, we come to grasp the weight of a complex past on the present day. I was in awe of the subtle purity with which Erdrich makes these separate pieces connect, ultimately bringing her protagonist towards terms with his reality and his identity.

As I said, the characters are wonderful. There's Joe's soft-spoken, intelligent father, Bazil. There's Joe's best friend, Cappy, the boy we all remember from adolescence who seemed to be a step ahead of us in confidence and experience, if not always wisdom. There's an ex-Marine priest, who has a singularly painful reason for choosing his vocation. There's an old man whose nocturnal tales confuse (or perhaps not) real events and tribal mythology. There's one of the dirtiest-minded old grandmas I've ever encountered in fiction. Erdrich's craft as a writer is such that I felt that I knew these people well and could picture their backstories and relationships within a couple pages of meeting them. (If I have a complaint at all, it's that the villain's pretty one-dimensional, but that wasn’t a big issue for me.)

The central, recurring theme in The Round House is that of overlapping worlds. I knew I was in love with the writing a few chapters in, when Joe explains Star Trek: the Next Generation from the perspective of reservation boys. In this personal way, Erdrich explores several other blurred boundaries, such as that between the Indian world and the white world, the way both Christian and native beliefs have personal meaning, the difficult crossing between childhood and the adult world, and the conflict between personal justice and the importance of rational, impartial law. I loved the way she brought these separate threads together in the raw, but beautifully symbolic final chapters. This is the novel that many aspiring writers attend MFA programs in search of, but few pull off.

To me, Gary Farmer did a good job with the audiobook narration, though some listeners might find the halting intonation of his Native American accent a little reminiscent of William Shatner. The only other book of Erdrich's I've read before was A Plague of Doves; while it was good, this is the one to start with.

Don't give up on the narrator--the story itself is well worth listening to, and the narration improves slowly as the story builds, especially in the second half. I found the book to be excellent, the storyline exciting and fascinating, and the characters well-drawn. The story is told through the eyes of a 13-year-old native American boy, which is quite a feat for a 58-year-old woman writer, and she pulls it off beautifully. The narrator is apparently an American Indian actor, but he is so unskilled at narrating that I almost gave up on the book at first. He does the strangest things with sentences, often coming full-stop after the verb, and seeming to start a new sentence (as in, "He laid his bike against the fence. Before he went into the woods.") His inflection is all over the map, oftentimes obscuring the meaning of the words he's reading. (Didn't he practice ahead of time, one wonders?) As the story builds in intensity, however, the narrator seems to fall into a more normal inflection pattern, and contributes to the excitement of the story instead of detracting from it, as he does in the first half of the book. In any case, the story is so compelling that I stuck with it, and was so glad I did...even gasping and weeping a few times. Thank you, Louise Erdrich.

A coming of age story for a young indian boy who has to come to grips with his culture and the larger world around him. A little bit mystery, a lot of culture, and intriguing look into a part of US history, family and the future.

This is not your "everyday" mystery and if your looking for John Grisham or some other plot heavy, thinly written book you may not be happy. However, if you like to step outside the usual mystery box this might be the ticket.

Be forwared: listen to the narrator online first as he is clearly Indian with the cadences and nuances that go with this style of communication. But if you like Mark Hammer, your are in like Flynn.

This was a wonderful book, so complex and heartfelt. The comparisons to "To Kill a Mockingbird" are apt in that a young boy learns about his life and his family through experiencing a crime. His father is a judge on a Native American reservation.

Well deserving of the National Book Award.

The reader is a Native American actor, I think, which is great, because he speaks with a cadence that is distinctly from that cultural background. The reason it takes getting used to is that this sort of cadence puts emphases on other parts of the sentence than we are used to hearing from other actors who read audiobooks. It was odd at first, but after getting used to the style, I really enjoyed his performance and I think it added a needed authenticity.

I felt that this was a most satisfying audible book, not just because it's a great book, but because First Nations member, Gary Farmer, was the perfect choice to narrate this book. Sometimes the narration gets in the way when it isn't spot on, but Gary Farmer adds so much to this book that I'm really pleased I chose to listen to this book instead of reading it.